IV
“That’s it,” Vivienne said. “That’s the last journal.” She waited quietly while Freya got her head together.
“I’m hungry,” she said, helping herself to water and snacking on some of the dried meat from the kitchen. As she did so, Vivienne tidied the table of all the books and documents from their last session. She did a comprehensive job and the rooms were pretty much as they’d first found them.
“I’m glad. I’m tired of-I’m actually tired of being tired.” She yawned. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’ve been cooped up in here long enough.” Vivienne stood and stretched.
“What about Daniel?” Freya sighed. “Any word or sign of him? As though you care?”
“That’s rather unfair.”
“Forgive me for saying it, Vivienne, but you seem very blase about all of this.”
Vivienne shrugged on her coat. “When you get to my age, you either risk everything or you risk nothing. I’m sorry if you find me cold. But in the scheme of things, I find I’m most effective if I try only to affect the things that I can control, and leave the things that I can’t to play out by themselves.”
“Great. Well, Daniel’s certainly out, since no one can seem to control him. But shouldn’t we. . look for him? Possibly?”
“Yes. Certainly. We certainly should go looking for him. Shall we go now?”
“Um, before we go down, there’s one more room to see. We should check that out, if we’re going to be thorough.”
“Really? You’re happy leaving Daniel out wherever he is?”
Freya glared at her. “Now you’re being unfair. You know what’s in that room, and I want to know as well.” Freya packed the bedroll up and crammed the few items she had taken out back into her backpack.
“Well, let’s go if you’re going, then,” Vivienne said in an inscrutable tone.
They went up the stairs in silence. Vivienne walking behind Freya, who soon wished Vivienne led the way.
They found the door and stood in front of it in silence for a few moments. Freya looked back at Vivienne. “Anything you want to say?”
Vivienne shook her head, and Freya pushed the door open.
It was a bedroom. It was not luxuriant but comfortable, with some pieces of wrought iron furniture and a golden light fixture just like the one in the other room. Against the far wall were stacks of the enchanted silver lamps, which cumulatively gave the room a sort of holy glow. The only other objects in the room were a bedstead with a thin mattress, some clean linen sheets-and a body.
“It’s Modwyn,” Freya said, inching closer to the bed. The ward of Ni?ergeard was stretched out on the bed, on top of the sheets, in her magnificent green robes that Freya had last seen her in, all smooth and perfect, her hair falling gently around her shoulders, curling and rising like waves upon a steep shore. “You knew she was here all the time.”
“She’s dead. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Really?”
“It-it wouldn’t have changed anything if you knew.”
“Really.” Modwyn’s posture reminded Freya of illustrations of Sleeping Beauty in the picture books she had as a child. Her arms crossed over her chest and she seemed to be holding something.
Freya edged even closer, half-expecting Modwyn to suddenly wake up and startle her. But she didn’t, and as Freya came closer, she realised, with dread, that she wouldn’t, ever, for clutched in Modwyn’s hands was the hilt of a knife. She’d plunged the blade into her own chest. A wave of anger rose and broke inside Freya. So that was it then. Modwyn had been so distraught at the invasion of Ni?ergeard that she had taken her own life, leaving all others to cope without her-abandoning the living. What a selfish tragedy.
“It was her final sacrifice,” a voice from the door said, making the two women jump. She turned and saw Frithfroth standing there, looking even more diminished and forlorn than ever. “It was not selfishness or fear that forced her into that act. In that act, she protected the tower from invasion. She saved the Carnyx, she saved Ni?ergeard.”
Freya turned back to the prone form of Ni?ergeard’s protectress. Not a part of her was decrepit or decaying. She really did look as if she were only sleeping.
“I come up and minister to her,” Frithfroth said. “I pay my respects and remember her and thank her for saving me. It was her last act-a loving one.”
“She’s dead, Frithfroth,” Freya said. “She’s just dead. She killed herself so she wouldn’t have to face the horror of being killed. She took the easy way out.”
“Don’t,” Vivienne said quietly.
Freya knew the temptation of ending all her problems by her own hand; it disgusted her that Modwyn had not been stronger than she was. She had left everyone alive to fend for themselves and thrown her lot in with the dead and decaying knights in the basement.
“Why hasn’t she decayed?” Freya muttered. And for reasons she only half understood, she reached out and pulled the knife out of Modwyn’s hands and out of her chest.
Modwyn drew a breath at the same time, her eyes snapping open, her mouth gaping for air, and Freya leapt back, her hand still around the knife, which had a stone blade. Her other hand flew to her chest, over her pounding heart, as she stared at Modwyn in fear. Modwyn tilted toward her in the bed and spent a moment coughing and wiping her eyes.
“Tha-thank you,” she croaked, gradually recovering enough to speak.
Vivienne and Freya could only watch and gape, eyes as wide as saucers.
“I’m sorry, Freya.”
“Sorry for what?”
“We told you so many lies.”
IV
Daniel woke up in his cell and almost burst into tears of relief. He rose from the cold floor and brushed himself off. The hallucinations, the visions, the eternally cyclical conversation-none of it was real. He gave a prayer of thanks to anyone who might be listening and sat on the stone bench, blowing on his fingers to warm them.
But he couldn’t see his hand. At first he thought it was because it was too dark, but then he noticed a thin line of brick-red smoke that extended and moved as if it were his hand. The two lights were forgotten now as Daniel explored this new effect. He reached his other out and saw another line of red smoke spread forward. He moved them back and forth, side to side, and crossed them together. They passed through each other without the slightest resistance.
He looked down at the rest of himself and found a thicker bar of smoke that divided at the end to mark his legs. He reached forward to try to touch a leg, but there was nothing to grasp onto and he spiralled out of control, a tumbling ball of smoke.
He started to expand, the molecules in his body dissipating. He filled the small room and spilled out into the hallway. He was without form except that which was imposed on him by walls. He grew to fill the city, aware of the points of life of the yfelgopes and the rest of the Ni?ergearders within it. He thought he could feel Freya.
He spilled into the overworld and had the experience of being both fully in the dark and fully in the light at the same time. He spread across the plains, into the cities, and throughout the country. He felt life as intense points of emotion inside of him. He could feel love and hate and was profoundly moved to find how little there was of either. Corruption and rot had set into the nation, and it was in the hearts of its people who harboured it. He reached out to pry it away, but it shrank and split from him as he grew larger, spilling across the planet and breaking through the stratosphere.
As he grew in the expanse of space that lay between the planets, he felt a moment of respite. The earth and all that was in it-so confused and muddled-shrank to a nearly microscopic thing inside of him.
Was this death? Was this the end? Would he continue stretching until he was one with everything? Would he stay fully conscious, or would he just melt away into creation? He started to mourn himself and all the things that he had left undone, the people he had left behind.